Study suggests open-access journals with questionable peer-review and marketing processes now publish hundreds of thousands of articles a year, a huge jump in only a few years.
October 1, 2015
"The rise of open-access publishing, combined with pressure on academics to get published, has caused a spectacular increase in the number of articles spewed out by "predatory" journals, according to researchers at Finland's Hanken School of Economics. Such journals, of which there are thousands, charge authors hundreds of dollars in return for lackluster or nonexistent peer review and rapid publication...the journals dumped more than 420,000 articles into the market in 2014, up from 53,000 in 2010...Predatory publishers and journals are a byproduct of the open-access movement. In order to provide free access to readers, many journals have passed costs on to authors themselves, charging them an article-processing fee that can range from a few hundred to several thousand dollars...Authors from Africa and Asia appear most willing to take the risk. They make up 76.7 percent of the authors of the articles captured in the study. Authors from India alone make up more than one-third, or 34.7 percent...India's and China's populations obviously skew the geographic breakdown. When it comes to the number of articles per capita, another country comes out on top: Nigeria. The researchers calculated each country's ratio of articles published in predatory journals to those indexed in Thomson Reuters's Web of Science. Nigeria had the highest ratio -- 1,580 percent -- followed by India (277 percent), Iran (70 percent) and the U.S. (7 percent)...Research published in predatory journals is polluting the entire scholarly publishing ecosystem."
Note: The National Universities Commission (NUC) of Nigeria and other such higher ed administration and quality control agencies in Africa ought to take note and evaluate their options.
Now, read the entire article and comments here:
Okey Iheduru, PhD
You can access some of my papers on the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) at: http://ssrn.com/author=2131462.
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